When the Past Isn’t Past: How Childhood Trauma Impacts Parenting Challenging Boys

We all know that we’re supposed to remain calm during challenging episodes, but knowing how is another story. Challenging episodes are highly provocative and stir intense emotions. It’s stressful when your child is refusing to get ready for school and you’re late for work. It’s embarrassing when friends are over and your son can’t get along with the other kids, or speaks to you rudely in front of the other parents. We worry about our child’s future when he refuses to do his homework or can’t make friends. In my last post, I pointed out that others blame us for our son’s misbehavior, and worse than that, we blame ourselves. This stress, embarrassment, worry and blame is a lot! In this post I will discuss one more reason why it’s very very difficult to remain calm during challenging episodes and how you can manage it: these episodes stir up unresolved feelings from our own childhoods. 

The groundbreaking ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study found, sadly, that most of us experienced some form of serious hardship during our childhoods—physical or sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, or parental substance abuse. Even those lucky few who grew up in relatively safe and secure homes often have unresolved issues that can surface in the face of challenging behavior. When left unprocessed, these traumas and issues leave emotional triggers behind that can lead us to overreact (or shutdown) during our son’s challenging episodes.

Our son’s challenging behavior might evoke feelings about a sibling who bullied us. Our our son might remind us of ourselves as a child and we become over identified with his feelings of mistreatment. Our spouse’s fight with our son might feel reminiscent of scary power struggles between a challenging sibling and an out of control parent. Or we might experience our spouse’s calm behavior during a challenging episode as being like a parent who didn’t protect us from a siblings who tormented us.

When we are triggered, we often don’t consciously make the connection between the feelings we experience during a challenging episode and the events from our childhoods that they come from. The triggers are like buttons on a time machine that take us from the present moment back in time to the feelings and reactions of some unremembered past. Instead of recalling past events, however, we reexperience the emotions and physiological reactions as if they belong to the present situation. We confuse past and present. It’s difficult to recognize that we’re triggered by our son’s challenging behavior because our reactions feel very vividly to be about the present situation, even though they actually come from our unhealed past. We can only see evidence that we are triggered indirectly.

We need to look for signs we are triggered. Here are some:

• Sudden, strong feelings of anger, fear, or helplessness.
• Feelings that are too intense and don’t match the circumstances.
• Feeling like you are in a near life-or-death crisis and that something must be done now.
• Physical symptoms like a racing heart, flushed skin, feeling out of breath, or a panic attack.
• Acting impulsively, sometimes shocking yourself or others.
• Feeling shut down, paralyzed, or numb.
• Experiencing shame, hopelessness, or despair after the episode is over.
• Having difficulty remembering exactly what happened.

This all can sound very daunting, but there’s a lot we can do to learn to manage our triggers and buttons. The first step is to identify our triggers. In my book Challenging Boys: A Proven Plan for Keeping Your Cool and Helping Your Son Thrive, I suggest using a journal to discover what our buttons and triggers are. Writing about our son’s challenging episodes not only helps process and relieve the bad feelings that these episodes evoke, but it creates a record that allows us to identify patterns including our triggers, our spouses triggers, and our son’s triggers. (Sign up below and receive the first chapter of my book for free where I discuss journaling, triggers, trauma, and planning).

Once we know what our traumas and triggers are, we are able to take steps to keep them from taking us over during challenging moments. First, knowing what our triggers are helps us make a plan for managing them during challenging episodes. This is what fire fighters do. They stay calm in challenging situations because they have a plan that they are implementing. They aren’t trying to figure out how to respond on the spot. Our plan can include steps to prevent the challenging moment from escalating, ways to coordinate with and give and receive support with our child’s other parent, and calming mantras we can say to ourselves (“I might feel scared and alone like I did as a child, but I’m an adult now and I can handle this”). Second, we can practice relaxation techniques—deep breathing, meditation—when we aren’t triggered so we can make use of these calming practices in the heat of the moment. Third, we can work on helping ourselves heal—through journaling, with therapy, through speaking with our spouse or another trusted friend—so that our triggers are less intense. 

Challenging episodes are, well, challenging. While we’re often told to remain calm, it’s incredibly difficult, especially when past trauma is involved.  But it is possible to manage your reactions and shift the dynamic in your home from conflict toward connection. Consider starting a parenting journal, identify your triggers, and seek support.  This journey is not easy, but you are not alone.  Join our community of parents facing similar challenges and find support and resources to help you along the way.